Pestle (3)
Mar. 24th, 2011 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolThird part. Still faking it. Don't judge me. DON'T YOU JUDGE.
The Swami had magicked up a nice schematic of Pestle. We were all gathered in the common room of _Abalone_ to review what we knew, or thought we knew.
"All right," said the Swami, "first a word on what happened to the Gob."
"He was Gobbled?" asked Hot Henry.
"He's Gob to meet his Maker?" suggested Layla.
"PERHAPS HE DIED," observed Hoggrid over the comm. Betellians don’t understand humor.
"He did die, Hoggrid," replied Swami. "An aperture on the spinward end opened and a beam of high-energy particles cooked him for around five seconds. We're not quite sure how high of an energy level, but temperature drop-off analysis suggests that the _Gob-Smacked_ hull hit six thousand degrees K."
Mincey whistled. "It's like the sun opened its mouth and rimmed him out," he grunted. Stay classy, Mincey.
I raised my hand. "Was that a booby trap or something else?" I asked.
"Unknown," answered Swami. "I checked alignment; that end of Pestle points at a cluster of stars in the Canis Majoris galaxy just next door. Twenty five thousand light years away, give or take."
"Then it's probably a booby trap, or at least some sort of weapon that was set to fire," I argued.
"We don't know, and I don't have any good guesses," said Swami. "One thing's for certain: I don't think we should mess with that end anymore unless we run out of other options. And that brings us to the portals around the meridian."
"Portals?" asked Lopez. "As in plural?"
"Yes," replied Swami. "Once you showed me what to look for, they weren't hard to spot. There are three of them in the groove, spaced equidistantly." He waved his hand and the image on the holo spun about.
"Here's the groove," he said, pointing his laser through the holo. The projection was set up to glow a bright blue where the laser intersected the image. "Jackpot and Lopez found a portal in it. It's round, around six meters in diameter, with three pie-wedge pieces for the door. It's thick, made out of the same stuff as the skin of Pestle, and appears made to hold vacuum. It stands up to enormous spheres rolling across it rather frequently, so I'm dubious about our ability to blow it open."
Muskie stood up and pointed to two dark spots flanking Swami's image of the portal. "What are these?" he asked.
"I'm getting there," smiled Swami. "Before I give you my thoughts on that, let's direct our attention to the portals on the spheres. Each sphere has two portals, each one centered on the axis of the line that intersects the equatorial groove, at perfectly opposite ends." He remanipulated the image, showing two spots on the top and bottom of a sphere.
"One portal," Swami said, "is equal to the equatorial portals in every sense. Projections show that these two portals align perfectly when they are in contact. The other portal on the sphere is much larger, is square, and has a recess next to it that might contain some kind of access control mechanism. Now: back to the odd spots. They don't seem to be a sophisticated mechanism of any type, but they do match in complimentary fashion when the two portals are aligned."
Lopez nodded in satisfaction. "They're probably optical recognition ports of some sort. They tell the portals when they're in sync."
"My thoughts exactly," said Swami. "So when the spheres roll over the portals in the groove, the corresponding portals in the sphere open as well. This creates a passage from the inside of the sphere to the inside of the cigar."
"I think I get it," said Hot Henry. "We break into one of the square portals, which gets us inside a sphere. We walk around the inside of the sphere to get to the other side, which shouldn't be too hard because the rolling sphere should generate some fake gravity. Once we get to the other side, we wait for the portal to open that gets us inside the cigar. Now that, too, is rotating, so we'll have to do some gymnastics to reorient for that gravity…"
"…but, theoretically, we are now inside the inner chamber of the tomb," finished Swami. "At least, that's how I see it."
"Fine, but then why did McMillan drop a transport onto one of the groove doors and let it get squashed?" I asked.
"I don't know," admitted Swami. "That part puzzles me. Perhaps it was part of an early attempt to spoof entry into cigar by fooling the optical recognition sensors. They tried it, it didn't work, so they went for plan B."
"Then where's their launch?" Layla asked.
"The square sphere doors are large enough to fly one inside," Swami answered. "It could be there, assuming they could open the doors and get the craft parked while the sphere is oriented correctly."
"That would be some nice piloting," muttered Layla. Layla would know; she was a hotshot ring-runner until she pissed off some syndicate lord and had to work for a living like the rest of us.
Swami opened his mouth to say something else, but just then something beeped on his console. Swami looked at it and frowned.
"Hoggrid," he said, "I deployed some prox-eyes before we started fooling with Pestle. One on the sunward side has tripped; go check it out. Everybody else, get to your ships." By the time Swami had finished speaking the room was empty; we knew we had sabotaged a police station, and getting caught by the fuzz with your vacuum suit down would be the cardinal sin for persons of our profession.
Lopez bounced down the intestine linking _Petunia_ to _Abalone_; I tripped and fumbled along after him. Weasards are bred for space hijinks; I just do my best. I dove through _Petunia_'s lock just as Lopez closed the doors and fired the bolts to release the intestine. Then he dove headfirst down the engineering access shaft while I vaulted into the cockpit and strapped in. When I toggled the encrypted comm channel, Hoggrid's artificial voice crackled over.
"…REPEAT, THIRTY FIVE SPECTRES. ENGAGING NOW AND WILL LEAD OFF AS POSSIBLE. MAY NOT HAVE SEEN CONVOY. NOW RECEIVING FIRE…"
Crap, I said to myself. Spectres are unmanned patrol units, typically used in areas off the beaten path where you're really, really not supposed to be. Spectres don't care about asking questions or finding out what you're doing there. They really don't care if there's people involved at all. All they do is seek out and destroy energy signatures. Out in the hinterlands, if you wipe out the energy production, life will follow quickly.
"Spectres, Lopez," I shouted, booting ship systems and warming fire control.
"Am aware, sir," my Weasard piped back. Technically he really is my Weasard; I won him fair and square before the Life Protocols abolished any sentient owning another sentient. Lopez and I had talked many times about waltzing into a Galactic Citizenship office and making his emancipation official, but of course we're wanted men, so nothing's that easy. The Ownership issue never arises except during arguments, which is somewhat frequent but rarely heated.
I saw Layla's Martian Sabre streak in front of my cockpit. Smuggler ships always made me jealous over how quick on their feet they were; my clunky Marine Dropship had better firepower, but it took us precious minutes to prep for action.
_Petunia_'s main reactor coughed to life; the startup vibrations knocked the fire extinguisher loose from its bracket (again) and made the engine temperature readout spike dangerously (as usual) before settling down. "We got wheels!" shouted Lopez.
"I got wheels; you got squeals!" I yelled. Before Lopez could strap down, I turned 2 and 3 to anterior, burned all four engines to flip us over, and then reoriented for maximum thrust. I heard Lopez curse and bounce around off hard surfaces for a few seconds. That's for the chili, I thought.
I swept _Petunia_ out of the ecliptic of the asteroid belt and went hunting for Hoggrid. He wasn't hard to find. First, a Betellian Corvaire is not a subtle ship; it's large and clunky and has the electromagnetic signature of a penny the size of Jamaica. Second, Hoggrid wasn't a subtle fighter; he preferred loud explosions and fancy piloting to efficient death-dealing. Third, the spectres were all talking to each other, and while they were encrypting, they weren't hiding their signals. _Petunia_ plotted them all without my even asking. They were rolling around the Corvaire in waves.
I had one spectre at extreme range with flechettes, so I fired a barrage in a standard spiral distribution. The spectre picked up the incoming fire as soon as it was close enough, but the spiral pattern meant it couldn't outrun the shot no matter which way it tried to escape. A few of the high velocity slugs holed one of its engines and the robot lost most of its maneuverability. Four of its closest neighbors turned and began to close on us.
"Lopez," I called sweetly, "do you have your vacuum suit on yet?"
"Yes," he replied, "and I crapped in the toe of yours while I was cleaning it out." That shut me up. Lopez rarely jokes about things like that.
Your ordinary spectre is all engines on one end, sensors and control at the other, and what's in between is drills and mandibles. A spectre wants to latch onto something with an interesting energy signature, tear its way in until it finds whatever is making said energy signature, and make it stop doing whatever it's doing. Spectres aren't equipped for long-range firefights; they commit, grapple and chew.
The Corvaire had three spectres clinging to it and three others hot on its heels. I saw Hoggrid pilot straight towards a spectre and ram it, breaking the automaton into several large pieces and shaking loose one of his grapplers at the same time. I didn't have time to waste on admiring Hoggrid's alien attack style, however. I reversed all engines, rocketed away from my four assailants, and directed fire control backwards.
A stream of flechettes knocked out guidance control on one of the spectres; it yawed lazily off to the side and gave up pursuit. The other three were closing too fast for the sluggish Dropship to outrun them, so I switched to blasters. Ah, Blasters; is there nothing you cannot do, especially at short range? I cut a radiant green arc through space, shearing the nosecone from the leading Spectre and sending the rest of it spinning in a thousand different directions. The other two closed from opposite sides; I was able to burn a hole in one of them, causing it to flame out and shear away, before the other reached out with a long articulated arm and bore a hole into _Petunia_'s side.
I turned a thruster onto it to keep it busy, then bounced down the shaft with my weapons. By the time I got to engine control, the hull of my ugly ship was in the process of being opened like a can of Spam. Lopez was using his blaster pistol on the sensor cluster of the spectre, which up close looked something like a twenty-meter spider with an arbitrary and varied collection of limbs. I burned it once with my blaster rifle, then jumped through the hole in my ship.
Jumping out into space is a dangerous thing. You really shouldn’t try it at home. Of course, if you're at home while you're jumping into space, then you're probably used to it, so forget what I just said. Use a safety line, or keep an industrial laser handy, which is what I wished I had had instead of a reciprocating sword.
I've had my reciprocating sword since the Jovian War. It's a meter and a half of six-hundred-horsepower, rotating bit, diamond tipped bladed mechanism of death-dealing. It's the kind of weapon that says Hello, Insectoid; Let's see what color you are on the inside. Mine has been stenciled with letters reading WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST, which is really just big talk; I have nothing against women and children unless they stand between me and a moderate amount of money. Besides, they're often much smaller targets.
I jumped onto the midsection of the spectre, locked on with my boots, and started making cuts. It had a very hard shell, but a reciprocating sword is not a tool that takes 'no' for an answer. It's also lousy with 'please' or 'help'. At one point I had to lop off a defensive tentacle, but the larger mangler-arms were easy enough to duck. Once I had made reasonably sized holes in the spectre's carapace, I was able to fire blaster shots into the hollow, and stuff an impact grenade in afterwards. A grappler arm snaked out and cracked me hard, knocking me loose from the spectre's surface, but I was able to get my jetpack around in time and boost myself back onto its sensor cluster. This was much easier going; three shallow cuts got me into one of its optics, and a single grenade made the whole thing go dark and very still.
Layla's Martian Sabre flashed past. There was simply no way a spectre was going to catch a ship that fast; she was having a field day pecking away at the pack from range. I could also see Hoggrid continuing to do battle with the main mass of the spectre attack force; it looked like his Corvaire had its own manipulating arms and was methodically pulling one of the robots limb from limb.
I leaped back to the ragged hole in _Petunia_. "Lopez!" I shouted. "Where are you?"
"I'm okay," he answered testily. "I'm behind the reactor trying to keep us from going critical, that's all."
"Oh," I said. "How's that going?"
Lopez stuck his nose out from the accessway and stared daggers at me. "I'll just go see about getting some atmosphere in the cockpit," I mumbled, and then got out of Lopez's hair.
From the cockpit I could see the graceless mass of _Abalone_ drifting by. "Swami, stay the hell out of this fight!" I said, even though the comm wasn't on. But as his ship lazily swam past the Corvaire and the pack attacking it, the spectres seemed to ignore it entirely. A nozzle poked out of the side of _Abalone_ and sprayed something. A cocooning of fibres covered the nearest spectres and they stopped moving.
Gaping, I fumbled for the comm. "What the hell was that crap?" I screamed.
"Oh, yes," said Swami. "Epoxy filaments. Something I've been working on. Seems effective."
"No, I mean why aren't they attacking you?"
"I changed my energy signature," he said. "They think I'm a radioactive meteoroid."
"Oh, is that all?" I groused. Sometimes I wish the Swami would share his little ideas in advance.
"I think we have the spectres in hand; I don't think there's anything else in range that can bother us for some time," Swami told me. "But I think we have a different problem."
I looked around the wreckage of my ship. "Is it a very problematic problem?" I asked.
"Could be," Swami said. "Hot Henry's run off. Went the opposite direction from the fight. I have no idea where he is."
The Swami had magicked up a nice schematic of Pestle. We were all gathered in the common room of _Abalone_ to review what we knew, or thought we knew.
"All right," said the Swami, "first a word on what happened to the Gob."
"He was Gobbled?" asked Hot Henry.
"He's Gob to meet his Maker?" suggested Layla.
"PERHAPS HE DIED," observed Hoggrid over the comm. Betellians don’t understand humor.
"He did die, Hoggrid," replied Swami. "An aperture on the spinward end opened and a beam of high-energy particles cooked him for around five seconds. We're not quite sure how high of an energy level, but temperature drop-off analysis suggests that the _Gob-Smacked_ hull hit six thousand degrees K."
Mincey whistled. "It's like the sun opened its mouth and rimmed him out," he grunted. Stay classy, Mincey.
I raised my hand. "Was that a booby trap or something else?" I asked.
"Unknown," answered Swami. "I checked alignment; that end of Pestle points at a cluster of stars in the Canis Majoris galaxy just next door. Twenty five thousand light years away, give or take."
"Then it's probably a booby trap, or at least some sort of weapon that was set to fire," I argued.
"We don't know, and I don't have any good guesses," said Swami. "One thing's for certain: I don't think we should mess with that end anymore unless we run out of other options. And that brings us to the portals around the meridian."
"Portals?" asked Lopez. "As in plural?"
"Yes," replied Swami. "Once you showed me what to look for, they weren't hard to spot. There are three of them in the groove, spaced equidistantly." He waved his hand and the image on the holo spun about.
"Here's the groove," he said, pointing his laser through the holo. The projection was set up to glow a bright blue where the laser intersected the image. "Jackpot and Lopez found a portal in it. It's round, around six meters in diameter, with three pie-wedge pieces for the door. It's thick, made out of the same stuff as the skin of Pestle, and appears made to hold vacuum. It stands up to enormous spheres rolling across it rather frequently, so I'm dubious about our ability to blow it open."
Muskie stood up and pointed to two dark spots flanking Swami's image of the portal. "What are these?" he asked.
"I'm getting there," smiled Swami. "Before I give you my thoughts on that, let's direct our attention to the portals on the spheres. Each sphere has two portals, each one centered on the axis of the line that intersects the equatorial groove, at perfectly opposite ends." He remanipulated the image, showing two spots on the top and bottom of a sphere.
"One portal," Swami said, "is equal to the equatorial portals in every sense. Projections show that these two portals align perfectly when they are in contact. The other portal on the sphere is much larger, is square, and has a recess next to it that might contain some kind of access control mechanism. Now: back to the odd spots. They don't seem to be a sophisticated mechanism of any type, but they do match in complimentary fashion when the two portals are aligned."
Lopez nodded in satisfaction. "They're probably optical recognition ports of some sort. They tell the portals when they're in sync."
"My thoughts exactly," said Swami. "So when the spheres roll over the portals in the groove, the corresponding portals in the sphere open as well. This creates a passage from the inside of the sphere to the inside of the cigar."
"I think I get it," said Hot Henry. "We break into one of the square portals, which gets us inside a sphere. We walk around the inside of the sphere to get to the other side, which shouldn't be too hard because the rolling sphere should generate some fake gravity. Once we get to the other side, we wait for the portal to open that gets us inside the cigar. Now that, too, is rotating, so we'll have to do some gymnastics to reorient for that gravity…"
"…but, theoretically, we are now inside the inner chamber of the tomb," finished Swami. "At least, that's how I see it."
"Fine, but then why did McMillan drop a transport onto one of the groove doors and let it get squashed?" I asked.
"I don't know," admitted Swami. "That part puzzles me. Perhaps it was part of an early attempt to spoof entry into cigar by fooling the optical recognition sensors. They tried it, it didn't work, so they went for plan B."
"Then where's their launch?" Layla asked.
"The square sphere doors are large enough to fly one inside," Swami answered. "It could be there, assuming they could open the doors and get the craft parked while the sphere is oriented correctly."
"That would be some nice piloting," muttered Layla. Layla would know; she was a hotshot ring-runner until she pissed off some syndicate lord and had to work for a living like the rest of us.
Swami opened his mouth to say something else, but just then something beeped on his console. Swami looked at it and frowned.
"Hoggrid," he said, "I deployed some prox-eyes before we started fooling with Pestle. One on the sunward side has tripped; go check it out. Everybody else, get to your ships." By the time Swami had finished speaking the room was empty; we knew we had sabotaged a police station, and getting caught by the fuzz with your vacuum suit down would be the cardinal sin for persons of our profession.
Lopez bounced down the intestine linking _Petunia_ to _Abalone_; I tripped and fumbled along after him. Weasards are bred for space hijinks; I just do my best. I dove through _Petunia_'s lock just as Lopez closed the doors and fired the bolts to release the intestine. Then he dove headfirst down the engineering access shaft while I vaulted into the cockpit and strapped in. When I toggled the encrypted comm channel, Hoggrid's artificial voice crackled over.
"…REPEAT, THIRTY FIVE SPECTRES. ENGAGING NOW AND WILL LEAD OFF AS POSSIBLE. MAY NOT HAVE SEEN CONVOY. NOW RECEIVING FIRE…"
Crap, I said to myself. Spectres are unmanned patrol units, typically used in areas off the beaten path where you're really, really not supposed to be. Spectres don't care about asking questions or finding out what you're doing there. They really don't care if there's people involved at all. All they do is seek out and destroy energy signatures. Out in the hinterlands, if you wipe out the energy production, life will follow quickly.
"Spectres, Lopez," I shouted, booting ship systems and warming fire control.
"Am aware, sir," my Weasard piped back. Technically he really is my Weasard; I won him fair and square before the Life Protocols abolished any sentient owning another sentient. Lopez and I had talked many times about waltzing into a Galactic Citizenship office and making his emancipation official, but of course we're wanted men, so nothing's that easy. The Ownership issue never arises except during arguments, which is somewhat frequent but rarely heated.
I saw Layla's Martian Sabre streak in front of my cockpit. Smuggler ships always made me jealous over how quick on their feet they were; my clunky Marine Dropship had better firepower, but it took us precious minutes to prep for action.
_Petunia_'s main reactor coughed to life; the startup vibrations knocked the fire extinguisher loose from its bracket (again) and made the engine temperature readout spike dangerously (as usual) before settling down. "We got wheels!" shouted Lopez.
"I got wheels; you got squeals!" I yelled. Before Lopez could strap down, I turned 2 and 3 to anterior, burned all four engines to flip us over, and then reoriented for maximum thrust. I heard Lopez curse and bounce around off hard surfaces for a few seconds. That's for the chili, I thought.
I swept _Petunia_ out of the ecliptic of the asteroid belt and went hunting for Hoggrid. He wasn't hard to find. First, a Betellian Corvaire is not a subtle ship; it's large and clunky and has the electromagnetic signature of a penny the size of Jamaica. Second, Hoggrid wasn't a subtle fighter; he preferred loud explosions and fancy piloting to efficient death-dealing. Third, the spectres were all talking to each other, and while they were encrypting, they weren't hiding their signals. _Petunia_ plotted them all without my even asking. They were rolling around the Corvaire in waves.
I had one spectre at extreme range with flechettes, so I fired a barrage in a standard spiral distribution. The spectre picked up the incoming fire as soon as it was close enough, but the spiral pattern meant it couldn't outrun the shot no matter which way it tried to escape. A few of the high velocity slugs holed one of its engines and the robot lost most of its maneuverability. Four of its closest neighbors turned and began to close on us.
"Lopez," I called sweetly, "do you have your vacuum suit on yet?"
"Yes," he replied, "and I crapped in the toe of yours while I was cleaning it out." That shut me up. Lopez rarely jokes about things like that.
Your ordinary spectre is all engines on one end, sensors and control at the other, and what's in between is drills and mandibles. A spectre wants to latch onto something with an interesting energy signature, tear its way in until it finds whatever is making said energy signature, and make it stop doing whatever it's doing. Spectres aren't equipped for long-range firefights; they commit, grapple and chew.
The Corvaire had three spectres clinging to it and three others hot on its heels. I saw Hoggrid pilot straight towards a spectre and ram it, breaking the automaton into several large pieces and shaking loose one of his grapplers at the same time. I didn't have time to waste on admiring Hoggrid's alien attack style, however. I reversed all engines, rocketed away from my four assailants, and directed fire control backwards.
A stream of flechettes knocked out guidance control on one of the spectres; it yawed lazily off to the side and gave up pursuit. The other three were closing too fast for the sluggish Dropship to outrun them, so I switched to blasters. Ah, Blasters; is there nothing you cannot do, especially at short range? I cut a radiant green arc through space, shearing the nosecone from the leading Spectre and sending the rest of it spinning in a thousand different directions. The other two closed from opposite sides; I was able to burn a hole in one of them, causing it to flame out and shear away, before the other reached out with a long articulated arm and bore a hole into _Petunia_'s side.
I turned a thruster onto it to keep it busy, then bounced down the shaft with my weapons. By the time I got to engine control, the hull of my ugly ship was in the process of being opened like a can of Spam. Lopez was using his blaster pistol on the sensor cluster of the spectre, which up close looked something like a twenty-meter spider with an arbitrary and varied collection of limbs. I burned it once with my blaster rifle, then jumped through the hole in my ship.
Jumping out into space is a dangerous thing. You really shouldn’t try it at home. Of course, if you're at home while you're jumping into space, then you're probably used to it, so forget what I just said. Use a safety line, or keep an industrial laser handy, which is what I wished I had had instead of a reciprocating sword.
I've had my reciprocating sword since the Jovian War. It's a meter and a half of six-hundred-horsepower, rotating bit, diamond tipped bladed mechanism of death-dealing. It's the kind of weapon that says Hello, Insectoid; Let's see what color you are on the inside. Mine has been stenciled with letters reading WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST, which is really just big talk; I have nothing against women and children unless they stand between me and a moderate amount of money. Besides, they're often much smaller targets.
I jumped onto the midsection of the spectre, locked on with my boots, and started making cuts. It had a very hard shell, but a reciprocating sword is not a tool that takes 'no' for an answer. It's also lousy with 'please' or 'help'. At one point I had to lop off a defensive tentacle, but the larger mangler-arms were easy enough to duck. Once I had made reasonably sized holes in the spectre's carapace, I was able to fire blaster shots into the hollow, and stuff an impact grenade in afterwards. A grappler arm snaked out and cracked me hard, knocking me loose from the spectre's surface, but I was able to get my jetpack around in time and boost myself back onto its sensor cluster. This was much easier going; three shallow cuts got me into one of its optics, and a single grenade made the whole thing go dark and very still.
Layla's Martian Sabre flashed past. There was simply no way a spectre was going to catch a ship that fast; she was having a field day pecking away at the pack from range. I could also see Hoggrid continuing to do battle with the main mass of the spectre attack force; it looked like his Corvaire had its own manipulating arms and was methodically pulling one of the robots limb from limb.
I leaped back to the ragged hole in _Petunia_. "Lopez!" I shouted. "Where are you?"
"I'm okay," he answered testily. "I'm behind the reactor trying to keep us from going critical, that's all."
"Oh," I said. "How's that going?"
Lopez stuck his nose out from the accessway and stared daggers at me. "I'll just go see about getting some atmosphere in the cockpit," I mumbled, and then got out of Lopez's hair.
From the cockpit I could see the graceless mass of _Abalone_ drifting by. "Swami, stay the hell out of this fight!" I said, even though the comm wasn't on. But as his ship lazily swam past the Corvaire and the pack attacking it, the spectres seemed to ignore it entirely. A nozzle poked out of the side of _Abalone_ and sprayed something. A cocooning of fibres covered the nearest spectres and they stopped moving.
Gaping, I fumbled for the comm. "What the hell was that crap?" I screamed.
"Oh, yes," said Swami. "Epoxy filaments. Something I've been working on. Seems effective."
"No, I mean why aren't they attacking you?"
"I changed my energy signature," he said. "They think I'm a radioactive meteoroid."
"Oh, is that all?" I groused. Sometimes I wish the Swami would share his little ideas in advance.
"I think we have the spectres in hand; I don't think there's anything else in range that can bother us for some time," Swami told me. "But I think we have a different problem."
I looked around the wreckage of my ship. "Is it a very problematic problem?" I asked.
"Could be," Swami said. "Hot Henry's run off. Went the opposite direction from the fight. I have no idea where he is."
